The famous novel The Hands of Orlac was filmed several times, but many critics consider Mad Love to be the best version. It is a horror film without monsters, playing instead on a very real terror, the fear of being manipulated against our will. Peter Lorre in his first American film gives a remarkable performance as the demented Dr. Gogol, a sadistic surgeon who, out of mad love for a stage actress (Frances Drake), grafts new hands onto her concert-pianist husband (Colin Clive); the hands, from a recently guillotined murderer, still long to reach out and choke someone. Lorre makes the surgeon quite credible, both as an ominous creature and as a psycho-sexual case study (Gogol worships a life-size statue of the actress's image, and attends every performance of a Grand Guignol drama in which she is placed on a rack and brutalized). Mad Love was directed by Karl Freund, a key cinematographer of German Expressionism (Metropolis, The Last Laugh), and shot by Gregg Toland (years before Citizen Kane, which also harked back to Expressionism) and Chester Lyons. William K. Everson calls it “one of the best Hollywood chillers” and notes, “This is no tongue-in-cheek affair.”